"She is not dead, but sleeping, Jesus says in the Gospel of Luke; like the sick girl of that verse, the speakers of Joanna Valente’s sharp and urgent Marys of the Sea toss and turn through a series of feverish nightmares that refract lived experiences into prophetic and wild new imaginings. Preoccupied with the consequences of mothering and not-mothering, these fifty-three poems trenchantly interrogate sexual violence and its aftermath, lingering at the site of trauma as though hanging onto the lip of an abyss. Writing becomes power, structure an act of bravery. Like an ancient civilization's first creation myths, these poems utter light out of darkness as they order a world into being." -Monica Ferrell, author of The Answer Is Always Yes and Beasts for the Chase "Visceral in its fearlessness and candor, Valente's Marys of the Sea is a bravely, nuanced exploration of the subversive and sensual tensions that pulse in language and flesh. Marys of the Sea speaks of wounds, wombs, regeneration, and how experiences, particularly for women, undulate against a mythos of loneliness that can, without mastery and witnessing, devour. Valente writes, "In other languages my heart/beats us both alive, wedges/between words I speak.../" Here, it is only poetry that can begin to examine the blue underside of Valente's world and the oceanic perspectives of love that end and begin endlessly in the body, both feeding and killing at once. Valente's lyric is sinewy and spiritual. A whole world strands itself beautifully in the stunning eyes of Valente's intuition and intelligence. Always aware of what poetry demands even while it is breaking us apart, Valente's poems survive wholly in their heart-break: "Early bloomer, still waiting for the one poem/ that will bring me home.'" -Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Lighting the Shadow, Mule &amp; Pear, The Requited Distance, and Miracle Arrhythmia "The title poem of this collection, Marys of the Sea, alludes to “two people at the bottom of a fish tank.” So much of what we see in the world is blurred by our experiences and imperfections. These poems too, are blurred by tragedy, loss, and despair. It is hard to see clearly but Valente’s perspective is keen. It is the world that is blurred and dirtied. This is a collection of poems best read one by one and not all at once. For as Valente says, “Let [it] simmer, don’t eat it all at once.” There is so much hunger and appetite in these poems. Like the speaker, we all want what is out of reach, but sometimes in the world of the poem, we achieve our wantings. The book is quest-like in its search for love and its search for acceptance. What lies in its depths are: shadow wives, girlhoods, bones, jarred-starlight, alongside Mary and Lucifer--showing the reader the layers of life and death in this “so-called new world” we live in." -Leah Umansky, author of Domestic Uncertainties, Straight Away the Emptied World, and Don Dreams and I Dream

Marys of the Sea

Literature & Fiction

Valente, Joanna C

Poetry

Operating System

“'By the fear in her face I don’t think she knows realness,' writes Blake Nemec in his disarmingly original book Sharing Plastic. And what’s real here is the “banter” of sex and hotel workers that in spectacular glimpses reveals their behind-the-scene intimacies and the endless negotiations needed to get paid, stay alive, and avoid arrest. The specter of violence always at the margins of their swagger and wit, we listen to them as they arrange their 'bodies of work' in latex, or assemble pillows on beds (because 'pillows are my paycheck'), as they discuss how to 'organize dating' while on a wine-tasting tour, or urge a co-worker troubled by a John who looks like Brad Pitt to 'pretend he was Judith Butler.' Smart and funny, Nemec’s debut book of poetry shows us that 'talk is rope,' that individual voices find their strength braided together in common purpose. I urge you to listen."—Rosa Alcalá "Reading a blake nemec book you realize what people must have felt after a month or two in Warhol’s Silver Factory—simultaneously the multimedia blitz, the making of a dozen different movies around you, the pillows of silver mylar floating through air, the silkscreened flowers, and the soul-shattering buzz of being in the most exciting place on earth. Puzzling, but definitely thrilling. nemec’s work is filled with stories and dialogue, but also analytic passages that combine raw bioenergy with Noel Coward wit. And so sexy! “Their torsos/ / swooshed past each other’s/ images, but bent towards one another’s mouths lipping off....” This broken mess of exquisite diamond dust, this altar of soul and desire, will give God a new face." - Kevin Killian "In Sharing Plastic, blake nemec opens our hearts to those who do the hard and marginal work of the world, putting their “hired hands” and other body parts into service for us, whether as domestic workers, sex workers, or others who live on the razor’s edge of risk. “Our lips/won’t get sealed with service/fees and arrest/threats will not clip our echo,” nemec declares on behalf of his people. These poems are as generous and expansive in their plasticity as the resilient voices that animate them. And the visuals in these pages—vibrant images of bodies, forms, and altered documents—sinuously intersect with nemec’s text to counterpoint and complicate the book’s empathic vision. Sharing Plastic is a resonant and expressive book of grit and grace." —David Groff, author of Clay ------------------------------
Sharing Plastic is a gushing homage to each worker who has feared arrest. It is a confrontation to an undiscerning view of migration and whiteness. At times playful while others severe, this hybrid poetry/fiction collection works to lengthen sonic intimacies between unprotected workers by snaking such dialogues or scenarios next to one another as one resonating force. Different from literature that finds poetic tension between informal trade workers and their bosses, or poems that distantly paint a marginalized worker scenario as dramatic, these episodes hone in on the loving or volatile worker to worker exchanges. The characters and voices in these vignettes cinematically traverse between El Paso, San Francisco, Oakland and Chicago. In a political time when people are bracing themselves each time they turn on the news, Sharing Plastic, alongside other voices which only know flux, suggests honoring those who have long known how to navigate the temporary.

Sharing Plastic

Business & Money

Nemec, Blake

Economics

"Gregory Crosby’s poetry matches an extensive knowledge of literary form with a curator’s eye for the idiosyncrasies of our popular culture. He zooms in on familiar scenes of contemporary life – 'Lonely Starbucks Lovers,' 'Netflix &amp; Chill.' He writes elegant elegies for David Bowie and Adam West. Here is a poet who is able to compose in the midst of chaos, refusing to resort to the easy narratives that make sense of it all. This allows his work to embrace a democratic range of experiences from the political to the banal. Crosby can’t help being engaged, often satiric, but always sincere; he wonders, 'How to say something to see something. / How to give voice to despair without/ giving in to despair.' Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion is a poetic survival manual – a guide for navigating a maze of contradictions. It’s a must read!" - Elaine Equi Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion is just that—the thoughts that arise as you turn your back on whatever catastrophe of air and light is blossoming in your wake and press forward as best you can, the roar in your ears turning somehow into poetry. Among the shrapnel: time, mortality, culture, dead twins, funeral strippers, lonely Starbucks lovers, apocalyptic elections, ennui, extended plays, injustice, aubades, Pluto, sex, loneliness, Bowie, Batman, strange dreams, reading comics by flashlight, democracy in ruins, racism, hope, melancholy, masks, pierced tongues, lost souls, scarecrows, violence, love, American twilights &amp; resistance, resistance, (nevertheless) resistance. Also a dog, barking in the distance.

Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion

Crosby, Gregory

"These companionable, searching, smart, smart-ass diary-poems—one per week of pregnancy—talk their human into the baby moving through her into love, racism, climate change, kitties who turn into tigers, domination/damnation of capital, body-pain, fear, gritted teeth, safety (maybe, sometimes), future (maybe), autonomy (no such thing), love." --Catherine Wagner   "One of my new favorite books! Adra Raine writes poems while pregnant, collaborating with her unborn child, taking long, contemplative looks at the world as cells proliferate inside. Her body is part of our own awakening, to not be shy in a world ready to judge by race, by sex, gender. This is a book about getting ready. This is a book of revolution for beauty unleashed!" - CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death  "There’s a scratching uneasiness under Adra Raine’s Want-Catcher: A Record of Pregnant Writing. Certainly, we find it in the anxious, intimate accounting of what Raine expects motherhood will change. She renders these instabilities with a directness that doesn’t pretend at settled clarity. But what surprised and troubled me is how consumerism wends its hungry way through the 32 weeks documented here. 'A want is a mole,' Raine writes, suggesting first the small creatures that live inside the dark. But isn’t a mole also a kind of traitor? Want-Catcher digs through to shine light on desires, how they can turn people into things and leave us wanting. How they tunnel their way into the life-changing and the life-making. Intimate accounting indeed". --Douglas Kearney  Want-Catcher comes out of Adra Raine's writing through her first pregnancy and the way contemporary U.S. culture speaks through, at, and against the pregnant body. Becoming pregnant in late capitalism, one of the first things one encounters in the pregnancy-industrial complex is week-by-week guides to what is happening in the body and in the fetus's development, along the path to the 40-week "due date." Taking the week as a unit of measure, Raine wrote for ~forty weeks, at the end of which arrived a baby and a book. With both, she writes, she "met a remaining stigma around pregnancy and parenthood, domestic topics both too personal and too mundane to talk about in public, much less write and read poetry about." Is this poetry? It may be prose poetry or poetic prose, or maybe it's memoir or creative nonfiction. Whatever it isn't, Want-Catcher is an offering: a communion of thoughts and feelings and language, a meditation on time and time's record.

Want-Catcher: A Record of Pregnant Writing

Biographies & Memoirs

Raine, Adra

Community & Culture

Exploring a tangled, unsettled love for place amid the landscape, cultures, and social and ecological crises of South Louisiana, ARK HIVE seeks amid the ruins for answers—what does it mean to be here, now? Following the ley-lines carved out in the streets and bayous of a rapidly eroding landscape, this collection refuses stability, confident of only the riddle and the manifold voices activating it. Reed’s formal hybridity juxtaposes hand-made maps, collaged language, and altered documents with lyrics and lyric essays: “fragments [from] journals, photographs, memory, archives—time capsule of a disintegrating world.” ARK HIVE bears its loves and dead along the current of the work’s own profligate vegetative urge—accretions of history and immersion, saturations of grief and delight. Tender and monumental, a teeming hive of voices, ARK HIVE returns an extraordinary, vanishing world to the center of our attention.
"There are locations—like Hawai’i, like Louisiana—where cultures are unique to the place, and outsiders are made to know themselves from insiders. As a poet familiar with issues of appropriation and theft, Marthe Reed asked herself how a Californian who had lived in Providence and Perth, could write about Louisiana, a place she loved over her many years of living in Lafayette. “Writing Louisiana, outsider-inside, poles of affection and alienation push and pull against me.” Her answer was to piece together an archive, and to write an epic from its documents: photographs, maps, names of birds, travel journals, histories, languages. What ultimately brings this material to life are the heart-lyrics stitched through the whole: from “threnody”: “I keep the contents of my heart / stacked in wet clay / heavy with downpour,” where “behind the grate the small / eyes of an armadillo / muted reek / of urine and feces[.]” The threnody she wrote was for a beautiful, fraught, and fragile place. It grieves me to write my paragraph in the past tense. Shortly before she died she told me, “We’re all going to die and no one will remember us; it’s ok.” We are here to remember her and this ravishing, important, necessary work." --Susan M. Schultz

Ark Hive

Reed, Marthe

How do poets of color come to know what they do about their art and practice? How do they learn from and teach others? For poets of color, what does the relationship of “what one knows” have, with conditions extending but not limited to publishing, mentorship and pedagogy, comradeship and collegiality, friendship, love, and possibility? Is one a real poet if one does not have an MFA? For minority poets not considered part of the mainstream because of the combined effects of their ethnic, class, racial, cultural, linguistic, and other identities, what should change in order to accord them the space and respect they deserve? How best can they discuss with and pass on what they have learned to others? These and other questions come up so consistently in our daily experience as poets of color. And we hear them from poets of color at various stages of their careers. Out of the desire not only to hear from each other but also to share what we’ve learned—each from our unique as well as bonded experiences of writing as poets of color in this milieu—this anthology project was born. In this collection, we make no claims of presenting any definitive theoretical or other stance. Neither do we offer these essays as prescriptive of certain ways of thinking of craft or of doing things, although in them is expressed a collective wish—that writers of color find ways to gain strength and visibility without replicating the systems that play the game of divide and conquer and turn us against each other for narrow or self-serving profit. Instead, let there be a steady effort to compile lore and take inventory of strategies, intersections, bridges; to map our histories, to sight possibilities for the future. We are honored and thankful to have the words of the following poets in this anthology: Mai Der Vang (Foreword), Ching-In Chen, Addie Tsai, Tony Robles, Wendy Gaudin, Ernesto L. Abeytia, Abigail Licad, Tim Seibles, Melissa Coss Aquino, Sasha Pimentel, Jose Angel Araguz, Khadijah Queen, Remica L. Bingham-Risher, Ocean Vuong, Craig Santos Perez, and Kenji Liu.

Of Color: Poets' Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics

Igloria, Luisa A.

"This book is evidence of unusually ebullient thinking about the spongy and interbred archives of petropolitics &amp; necropolitics--life and death produced for/from the manna of fossil fuels--which Tierney parses, imbricates, and translates into poems that are wet and living, petrified and stony, made of paper and people, just like the range of archives she plumbs....This is a work of remarkable insight, confident tonal variance, and playful intelligence." - Divya Victor, author of Kith
"This haunting and profound collection explores the traces of petroleum refineries, factories, landfills, train stations, nuclear power plants, and other sacrifice zones in the United States, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and the Pacific Islands. Throughout, Tierney creates an archive of oily verse, cut-up essays, textual collage, and actual polaroids to capture the elastic entanglements between 'humans' and the 'planet, ' between 'carbonauts' and the 'plastisphere.' As companion readers, we are guided into the troubling 'Urf' and urged to discuss: Can poetry help us navigate unseen ecologies? Can poetry become a carbon sink? Can poetry metabolize the world so that we can continue to grow and love with 'concussive tenderness'?" --Craig Santos Perez
"a year of misreading the wildcats follows intrepid petronaut Orchid Tierney as she painstakingly assembles a nonce archive of the 'waste - natures that coagulate' at the watery peripheries of northeastern U.S. cities like Philadelphia, Camden, and Boston. What moves me most about these 'carbifereous lamentations - of plastimodernity' is that Tierney's docunaut is no impartial archon, but rather a deeply intricated, implicated, and impassioned environmental advocate and cultural critic. Knowing that "the poetics I have imagined are not sustainable, not extreme enough to handle the carbon in the atmosphere or the plastic in the oceans, ' she asks the most difficult question facing us at this historical moment: what does it mean 'to know our extinction, and do it anyway'? In place of an answer, this book offers a stance, a way of relating to the great acceleration of waste with which we're all complicit: 'in such traces, I lung with ash, /ambulate with love and venom.'" --Brian Teare, author of Doomstead Days
Excerpts / previous versions appear at Radioactive Moat and Pacifica Review wildcat: a boring, an aperture, an exploratory well. 'a year of misreading the wildcats' unravels a sprawling, year-long encounter with petroleum that began with a strip of plastic, caught between the branches of a maidenhair tree. This hybrid collection of poetry, prose and Polaroid photography drills the archive for film scores, fiction, and scholarship to recover the intertextual saturations of plastic and plankton, oil and oceans. Toggling between phantom islands and garbage gyres, the Pacific and Pennsylvania, a year of misreading the wildcats documents the impossible project of both environmental literature and photography to critique and catalogue disaster. This collection is a refusal for a narrative, where climate change denies the islands' one.

A Year of Misreading the Wildcats

Tierney, Orchid

This playful abecedarian speaks back to its titular epithet by looking both figuratively and literally at the navel. It includes the curious state of lint and bacteria and what humans have been known, disgustingly, to do with them (hello, navel cheese!). Also appearing: Hawaiian and Hindu origin stories rooted in the navel that connect us, with urgency, to the divine; the role of the navel, our first wound, in and after human birth; a story of the author's own regrettable 90s-era teenage navel piercing and the plastic surgery that removed her mother's navel, and more.Styled as a self-referencing cabinet of curiosities, this chapbook provides compounding insight into the navel. It is also a Rorschach for the genre of creative nonfiction. This text demands you be swayed to see what, in fact, is so good about looking at one's own navel after all

Enter the Navel: For the Love of Creative Nonfiction

Roy, Anjoli

Essays & Correspondence

What I want is the intimacy of anonymous encounters within the text itself, and yet to be effaced and revealed, even and especially by my own authorial departure. And it would take the form of a repetition or a reversal; a re: verse in which we correspond lyrically; a re: verse in which our correspondence becomes the poem. Of course, an integral part of any correspondence is the space between things, those slender apertures lit up with waiting. It is in these liminal spaces that possibility accumulates. We write toward this space, in response to its silences.

re: Verses

Campanioni, Chris

Darling, Kristina Marie

Reszies, Heidi

Goodbye Wolf is a collection of poems alternating between the author's subversion of the horoscope and its tropes and his epistles to chronic illness, dear wolf or lupus. The poems explore the everydayness of disease and the absurdity of asking for answers from the stars -- and of course waiting for their replies. Someone once told me the longer you wait for the bus, the sooner it'll arrive.

Goodbye Wolf

De Dominic, Nik

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